Gaiam: How a Catalog Brand Built At-Home Yoga's Market

Oct 18, 2026 / Oct 19, 2026 · 9 min read · catalogs home decor shopping ·

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The yoga mat under a studio floor and the balance ball chair tucked into a home office rarely carry any hint that both trace back to the same Boulder, Colorado mail-order catalog — and fewer shoppers know that the company now selling under that name isn't the one that originally built it. Gaiam has spent close to four decades turning a recycled-paper catalog into one of the most recognized names in at-home yoga and wellness gear, surviving a 2016 corporate split that sent its original parent into streaming video while the Gaiam brand itself kept selling mats, props, and fitness equipment under new ownership. Understanding that history — who built the catalog, what it grew to include, and who owns the name today — is the difference between shopping a brand with a real manufacturing and distribution record and assuming a familiar logo always means the same company is still behind it.

Gaiam

Gaiam manufactures and sells yoga mats, yoga props, yoga clothing, yoga accessories, and fitness and yoga DVDs.

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A Recycled-Paper Catalog Out of Boulder

Gaiam's origin story starts with its founder's earlier ventures, not with yoga at all. Jirka Rysavy left Czechoslovakia in 1984 and settled in Boulder, where he took a print-shop job paying $3.35 an hour, saved $600, and used it to start a recycled-paper distribution company called Transformational Economy, or Transecon, which earned $100,000 in pretax profit its first year. A year later he put $30,000 into a natural foods store, Crystal Market, which brought in $2.5 million in its first year and later became the first store in what grew into the Wild Oats Markets grocery chain. Rysavy then bought a downtown Boulder office supply store and built it into Corporate Express, a worldwide corporate office-goods supplier that eventually became a Fortune 500 public company.

Gaiam itself was incorporated in 1988 as a direct-mail catalog affiliate of Transecon, selling recycled paper products to the same values-driven customer base Rysavy had been courting since his first natural foods store. The company's headquarters settled at 360 Interlocken Boulevard in Broomfield, Colorado — a location it would occupy for years afterward — and the name itself was built from "Gaia," the ancient Greek earth goddess, combined with "I am," meant to evoke a sense of human interconnectedness with the planet.

From Recycled Paper to the LOHAS Market

The catalog's real growth began in 1995, when Transecon acquired the catalog business from Seventh Generation, which had been producing and selling its own line of ecologically sustainable household products — recycled paper goods, nontoxic cleaning products, recycled plastic bags, and organic cotton linens and clothing made without chemical dyes. Published quarterly and distributed nationwide, that catalog carried more than 300 products. With the acquisition, Gaiam became Transecon's primary revenue source, growing from $229,000 in sales in 1991 to $8.4 million by 1995; the following year it ranked 34th on Inc. magazine's list of the fastest-growing private companies, with $14.5 million in sales. The company later rebranded that acquired catalog under its own "Harmony" name.

Growth on that scale required real infrastructure. Gaiam relocated to the Interlocken Business Park in Broomfield into a building constructed with renewable materials, energy-efficient lighting and cooling, nontoxic paints, and untreated wool carpet, and opened a 64,000-square-foot order-processing center in Cincinnati, chosen for its proximity to major shipping hubs. A chance meeting on an airplane between Rysavy and Lynn Powers — then a marketing and merchandising executive who had grown a 24-store chain into a 335-unit, $575 million retailer — led to Powers becoming Gaiam's CEO and president in 1996. That same year, sociologist Paul Ray published research identifying a consumer segment he called "Cultural Creatives" — an estimated 44 million people generating more than $200 billion a year, later known as the Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability, or LOHAS, market. Gaiam built its growth strategy around that exact demographic, which it measured at the time as 80 percent female, 20 percent male, with a median customer age of 42 and median household income of $52,000.

The Acquisitions That Built a Wellness Catalog

Gaiam moved deeper into fitness and wellness in 1998, paying $25 million in cash for a 67 percent stake in Healing Arts Publishing, doing business as Living Arts, a California yoga and meditation video producer that had been selling through roughly 15,000 retail outlets since 1987. An existing fulfillment agreement with InnerBalance Health, a Colorado direct-mail seller of vitamins, herbal supplements, and fitness equipment, evolved into outright Gaiam ownership that same year. The company's customer file grew from 300,000 names in 1996 to 685,000 by 1998, and its Inc. list ranking climbed to 11th in 1997 on $19.7 million in sales and 10th in 1998 on $30 million.

Rysavy stepped down from Corporate Express in early 1999 to take the CEO role at Gaiam full time, with Powers moving to chief operating officer while keeping the president title. Gaiam went public that October, offering stock first to its own 800,000 catalog customers at a 10 percent discount before the broader public offering, and Rysavy retained 77 percent ownership after the raise. The payoff from the Living Arts acquisition showed up quickly: by 1999 Gaiam's mind-body-spirit videos were running a 70 percent gross margin at $10 to $14 each, overall profit margin hit 60.2 percent, and the newly launched website was posting a 50 percent gross margin on a $100 average order — more than double the roughly $40 average and 17–20 percent margin typical of direct-mail retailers at the time, according to a company history later compiled by Encyclopedia.com.

SPRI, Real Goods, and a Business Bigger Than Yoga Mats

By the late 2000s, Gaiam had grown into a holding company far broader than a single catalog. A corporate subsidiaries filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission lists Gaiam Americas, Gaiam.com, Gaiam Direct, and several Netherlands-based Gaiam International entities handling its growing overseas business, alongside its SPRI Products fitness-equipment subsidiary in Illinois, a cluster of Real Goods solar-energy businesses in California, a spiritual-media production arm, and a majority stake in an eco-tourism operator called Natural Habitat. That spread of businesses — solar panels and spiritual film alongside yoga videos and fitness gear — reflected how far the original recycled-paper catalog had grown from its 1988 starting point.

Gaiam's 2006 annual report to the SEC described the company by then as a "lifestyle media company" selling across two segments: a business channel serving national retailers and corporate accounts, and a direct-to-consumer channel built on catalogs, the internet, direct-response television, and subscription clubs. By the end of 2006, Gaiam's media titles were carried in more than 68,000 U.S. retail stores, up from 55,000 a year earlier, reaching roughly 7.5 million direct customers across a catalog of about 10,000 stock-keeping units. Proprietary products — the company's own branded media, accessories, and soft goods — made up more than 70 percent of 2006 product sales. Target was explicitly named in that filing as Gaiam's largest single retail customer, and the company used direct-response TV campaigns to launch its mass-market "The Firm" fitness brand that same year, supplementing sales through established home-shopping channels.

The 2016 Split: A $167 Million Sale and a New Company

Gaiam's identity as a catalog and consumer products company ended in 2016. On May 10 of that year, the company announced definitive agreements to sell its branded consumer products business, following a separate sale of its travel business days earlier, for combined gross proceeds of roughly $180 million. Sequential Brands Group and its operating partner, Fit For Life LLC, agreed to acquire the branded consumer products business — including the Gaiam and SPRI brand names — for $167 million in cash. The sale closed on July 5, 2016, and GAIAM, Inc. formally changed its corporate name to Gaia, Inc., continuing to trade on NASDAQ under the ticker GAIA while refocusing entirely on its subscription video business, formerly known as Gaiam TV and today operating as Gaia, a conscious-media streaming service.

A related divestiture closed the eco-travel chapter of the business: Lindblad Expeditions acquired Gaiam's 51.4 percent interest in Natural Habitat for $12.85 million in cash, an interest the company had originally purchased for just $600,000 back in 2002. Today that eco-tourism operator continues as Natural Habitat Adventures, entirely separate from the Gaiam brand it once shared a parent company with. As part of the 2016 transaction, Gaiam's then-CEO Lynn Powers described the sale as placing "the Gaiam and SPRI brands" in the hands of a buyer she believed could keep building on their reputation in healthy-living markets — language that makes plain the Gaiam name itself, not just a product line, was what changed hands.

Where Gaiam Fits for a Shopper Today

What a shopper finds at gaiam.com in 2026 is the product brand that survived the 2016 split, not the original Boulder mail-order business — that business is now Gaia, the unrelated streaming company. The brand has changed hands again since then: in November 2021 Sequential Brands Group agreed to sell its activewear brands — And1, Avia, Gaiam and SPRI — to Galaxy Universal, a portfolio company of the private equity firm Gainline Capital Partners, for about $330 million, according to Retail Dive. Preqin's asset profile describes the brand's line today as premium yoga mats, yoga props and accessories, and active-sitting products such as balance ball chairs, sold through direct e-commerce and retail partnerships across North America, Europe, and parts of Asia.

That distinction matters for the comparison shoppers actually need to make: buying from gaiam.com gets access to the brand's full current lineup — yoga mats, meditation props, balance ball chairs, and related accessories — in one place, the same way the original catalog consolidated recycled paper goods, fitness videos, and wellness products decades ago. Buying a Gaiam-branded item through a mass retailer like Target trades that full-catalog depth for convenience and in-store availability, a tradeoff that traces straight back to the retail distribution network the company itself built starting in 1998.

That direct-purchase path also carries defined return terms worth knowing before checkout. Returns follow a 30-day window: items bought directly from Gaiam can be returned or exchanged within 30 days of purchase provided they're unopened and unused, while anything bought through a retailer such as Target falls under that retailer's own return policy instead — one more reason the direct-versus-retail choice matters beyond which items happen to be in stock.

Either way, a shopper picking up anything with the Gaiam name today is buying from a product brand with a genuinely long design and manufacturing history behind it — just not from the same company that mailed the catalog in the first place.